P. Djeli Clark books

Abeni’s Song Reading Order

Anthologies

Fatma El-Sha’arawi Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

The Time Traveler’s Passport Reading Order

P. Djeli Clark is the pen name of Dexter Gabriel, a speculative fiction writer and historian who teaches at the University of Connecticut. The name “Djeli” references the griots, traditional West African storytellers and historians. Born in New York City in 1971, he spent much of his childhood in Trinidad and Tobago before returning to the United States.

Clark’s best-known works are set in the Dead Djinn Universe, an alternate early 20th-century Cairo where magic, djinn, and steampunk technology coexist. The series includes the novelettes A Dead Djinn in Cairo (2016) and The Angel of Khan el-Khalili (2017), the novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (2019), and the full-length novel A Master of Djinn (2021), which won the Nebula and Locus Awards.

His other notable works include Ring Shout (2020), a dark fantasy novella that reimagines the Ku Klux Klan as literal monsters and won the Nebula, Locus, and British Fantasy Awards. Abeni’s Song (2023) is a middle-grade fantasy inspired by West African and African diaspora traditions. The Dead Cat Tail Assassins (2024) introduces a new world of gods and necromancer killers. When not writing fiction, Clark works as an academic historian specializing in comparative slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World.